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Opening Ceremony Offers Ugly, $425 Cut-Out, Detachable Jeans

At This Point, I'm Convinced Clothing Retailers Are Just Screwing With Us

PrintIan Lang

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2017 has been, to say the least, a very, uh, strange year. Not just because of the flea circus playing out in washington (though it's mostly that), but for whatever reason the American psyche is now so fundamentally broken that increasingly strange products are cropping up and forcing themselves into our attention spans. Fashion, it seems, is the worst offender.

But because no good deed goes unpunished and we've inflicted upon ourselves exactly the reality we deserve, the latest abominable assault on the humble denim pant comes in the form of these dumb things, available for women at online retailer Opening Ceremony. They're ugly, they look like riding chaps, they break off into shorts and even though I will never wear them, I hate them so much.

Opening Ceremony

What I want to know is, though, are these for real? Are fashion companies just f*cking with us at this point? On the one hand, there's no way they're not. These stupid jeans retail for $425, which is too much to pay for jeans that don't turn into jorts. Consider, too, the publicity the retailers themselves get when they launch these products: think about it, when was the last time you had a watercooler conversation about TopShop or Nordstrom? Prior to the clear panel and/or fake mud jeans, my guess would be never.

That said, there's actually a size that's sold out, the smallest. I suppose it's possible that Opening Ceremony engineered it that way so that these appear to be an actual, real thing people are buying, but it's also just as possible that there are a handful of really skinny women out there who can't wait to parade around their fashion-forward stomping grounds in whatever these are.

How long before someone takes the bold step of wearing them with just one leg attached? What's next, jeans with a hole cut in the butt with the words "FART CHUTE" crudely scrawled in sharpie above it? Are we far from the point when someone tries to sell us jeans that are literally on fire, cutely dubbed the "Liar Liar Jean" ($675 MSRP)?

Fashion is weird and deeply personal and open to infinite interpretations. But just as with what's happening elsewhere in the country, it's important to not normalize things that are self-evidently absurd just because it's the path of least resistance.